Radical Islamism and Jihad

Sophia A. McClennen

Sophia A. McClennen

Heineman notes that in Iraq and Afghanistan the strategy seemed to be “shoot first and ask questions later.” The problem is “We don’t think ahead. We don’t think about the next steps and that is how ISIS took hold. There was a vacuum in power. There was a lack of infrastructure. And people were suffering.” Ignoring the rebuilding effort is a recipe for more radicalization...

Mahmut Bozarslan

Mahmut Bozarslan

If IS adopts this guerrilla warfare style, everything could start over. IS does not want to give up Kirkuk and the Iraqi army and international forces do not want to ease up on IS. With guerrilla warfare tactics, this war could go on for years as both the societal and political environments are conducive to it....

David D. Kirkpatrick

David D. Kirkpatrick

The American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s furnished ample new material for jihadist preachers all over London, and Mr. Raja fell into a kind of voluntary social work. He mediated sectarian feuds, and befriended a small group of Kurdish immigrants who practiced what Mr. Raja called “gangsterised Islam,” justifying their street crimes by targeting non-Muslims. He tried to convince them that their faith required decency to all....

Asma Razaq

Asma Razaq

What a pity…. According to the official statistics, 60 million Pakistanis are living under the poverty line. Similarly, 2016 Global Hunger Index shows that 22 per cent of the total population of the country is undernourished having a serious hunger level while on the other hand, millions of rupees are being spent to construct a shrine made of cement and stones as a tribute to someone who was hanged for murder....

Muhammad Ali Siddiqi

Unlike their German counterparts, the robotised cadres of Pakistan’s terrorist organisations are cold-blooded murderers and bomb schools, mosques and shrines without a qualm; their German counterparts confined their violence to breaking up their rivals’ rallies, bashing their skulls and occasionally eliminating political opponents. The fatality toll during the 14 Weimar years was less than 100. In Pakistan, the number of the dead since 2007 has stood between 50,000 and 70,000.....

Mat Nashed

Mat Nashed

“Community divisions have resulted in some tribes coordinating with IS [to settle scores with their rivals],” said Badi. “If civil society can improve social cohesion, then terrorist groups will have a harder time to exploit disadvantaged youth, or create further chaos.” While that may be true, weak governance and the absence of a national army remain the biggest hindrances to eradicating IS. According to Rafideh, too many militias have political ambitions, while others prefer profiteering from the chaos than combating terrorism.....

Jane Arraf

Jane Arraf

More than five months later, the civilian death toll is still being calculated. The Iraqi government won't talk about casualties. But figures obtained by NPR from the Mosul morgue put the number of civilians killed at over 5,000. That is likely more than the number of ISIS fighters believed to have been in Mosul and presumed dead....

Osama Al-Sharif

Osama Al-Sharif

But, while the so-called caliphate no longer exists, the brand continues to linger. There are reports that hard-line fighters fleeing Iraq and Syria may be recuperating in Libya — a failing country with rival governments and many militias. Furthermore, Daesh remains active in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria and northern Sinai. Even in Syria, a small heavily armed faction, Jaysh Khaled Ibn Al-Walid, remains wedged...

Dr. Nasir Khan

In Maududi’s hidebound, conservative version of political Islam, there was no room for any western democratic and humanist traditions that are basic to a modern democratic state. There were to be no basic democratic freedoms of civil society (read all Muslim sects, and all religious minorities), and no space for an open and free educational system; such freedoms were subordinated to the Maududi’s Islamic indoctrination....

Jeffrey Gettleman

Jeffrey Gettleman

Bangladesh’s Islamist political parties, even if not in power at the moment, seem to be shaping the debate. Several intellectuals said they were scared to speak out about friends who had been killed. Islamists have succeeded in branding secularists as atheists; one of the most dangerous things to be called right now in Bangladesh is an atheist.....

Mahmood Hasan Khan

It took Europe over two centuries of turmoil and wars to resolve the issue of the separation of state from religion. European societies were plagued by this problem for centuries and popes and princes fought for the bodies and souls of their subjects. The governed had no role except to remain subservient to one or the other or both. It was Martin Luther (1483-1546) who successfully challenged the pope and his church, laying the foundation for the separation of state and religion. But it didn’t happen overnight or without turmoil and wars....

Syed Ata Hasnain

Syed Ata Hasnain

The Saudi initiative itself seems strange since it is the ideology which emanates from within the Saudi land which has been largely responsible for the spread of violent extremism around the world. Wahhabi Islam has the more obscurantist ideology. It is centred on Saudi Arabia but various schools of Islamic ideology have morphed today into radical beliefs, which attempt to keep the faith pegged to the conditions believed to exist in the period of the Salaf or the first three generations after the Prophet.....

Ahmad Abu Amer

Ahmad Abu Amer

Pessimism continues to prevail in the Palestinian street in light of the accusations over the reconciliation, which is gradually stalemating as the parties continue to postpone the implementation of what was agreed upon in Cairo Oct. 12. While Hamas accuses Fatah and the PA of delaying the implementation of the Cairo agreement, Fatah believes that Hamas has not totally empowered the government in Gaza.....

Zakir Gul

Zakir Gul

Democratic values shall never be omitted in the name of fighting terrorism as the democracy and terrorism is mutually exclusive. One critical rule here is terrorist organizations always benefit from the violation of democracy and human rights, and recruit more. Stricter policies and applications may backfire and only worsen the case. Instead, “winning hearts and minds” should one of the policies....

Rabbi Allen S. Maller

Rabbi Allen S. Maller

“Action against terrorism that targets civilians starts with a serious stand against every one of those who have issued and continue to issue Fatwas for targeting any civilians anywhere. From now on, they must be deemed accountable unless they retract their Fatwas; they must be off limits, their movements must be restricted, their media appearances prevented, the sale and circulation of their books banned, and any acts of support or financing for their charities — or even hosting them — criminalized....

Khayyam Mushir

Khayyam Mushir

If the examples of Mohammed Morsi and Rached Ghannouchi offer any counsel, it is that the leadership of a movement, radical or political, determine its objectives and play an influential role in charting its course towards the achievement of those objectives. From what we have seen, the leadership of the Barelvi movements is erratic, violent, confrontational and irresponsible. It will go to any lengths to clutch at power and may not be easily contained or remain a puppet in the hands of an apparently stronger patron....

Tushar Ranjan Mohanty

Tushar Ranjan Mohanty

Significantly, after the APS Peshawar attack, many loopholes in the security arrangements of educational institutions had come to light. Then media reports indicated that less than 10 per cent of schools in KP had adequate security arrangements to thwart APS-like attacks, while the rest were functioning without or with insufficient protection for the students. There are more than 3,200 private and public schools in Peshawar alone, but just over 200 were issued "no objection certificates" (NOCs) indicating that they had adopted adequate security measures....

Al-Monitor

In an audio recording released Nov. 11, al-Qaeda adherent Jund al-Islam declared war on much larger Wilayat Sinai, which is associated with IS, and claimed responsibility for the Oct. 11 attack on a Wilayat Sinai vehicle that killed the four passengers. Jund al-Islam is vowing to eradicate Wilayat Sinai members if they do not repent and abandon what it calls “Baghdadi law,” which it says violates Sharia in part because it targets civilians and fellow Muslims....

Nour Youssef

After the gunfire stopped, the boys emerged from the bathroom to find their mother wailing as she flipped over their dead neighbours and friends to search for her husband. She found his body lying over their 5-year-old son. The father, 52, had taken a bullet to the head but apparently saved the child....

HA Hellyer

HA Hellyer

In much of the international reportage around this brutal massacre, words such as “Sufi minority” were used, as though Sufism was some kind of marginalised sector cult, somehow dubiously related to Islam. That perception is not the perspective of the mainstream of Islamic thought. Historically, Sufism was regarded by Islamic scholars as being an integral part of the broader religious disciplines, and the practices of Sufis as being part and parcel of religious devotions....

Barbara F. Walter

Barbara F. Walter

If these groups have proliferated because Muslim citizens are supporting them for practical reasons — because Salafi-jihadist groups are better able to fight or offer greater reassurances against corruption — then effective counterstrategies have to address the conditions that make support for these groups advantageous. Eliminate the underlying conditions that make an extreme ideology beneficial to embrace, and you eliminate the incentives for elites and moderates to back it....

Alex Ward

But ISIS writ large isn’t just going after Sufis in Egypt. It continues to attack Sufis around the world, especially in Pakistan. Most infamously, ISIS bombed a Pakistani mosque in February that killed at least 70 people and injured more than 250. Four months before, ISIS murdered 52 people at a Sufi shrine. And in April 2011, suicide bombers killed 41 Sufis during a three-day festival....

Sonia Farid

Sonia Farid

The beheading of Sheikh Abu Heraz was preceded by the bombing of two Sufi shrines in North Sinai in August 2013: the shrine of Sheikh Selim Abu Garir in the village of Bir al-Abd, where al-Rawda Mosque is located, and the shrine of Sheikh Hamid in al-Maghara region. Several village residents said extremists threatened them a few days before the attack to kill them if they celebrate the prophet’s birthday, which falls this year on November 30, since it is considered an un-Islamic “novelty.” …

Greg Jaffe and Joby Warrick

Joby Warrick

The group views Sufi Muslims as apostates and has attacked Sufi shrines in northern Africa and Iraq. But the Islamic State has generally not targeted Sufis in Egypt, where the strain of Sunni Islam has deep roots that date back centuries and broad popular appeal. “As you get more desperate, you also get internal feuding over who is more puritanical,”...

The New Indian Express

On May 17, the IS set out its new Takfir stance. Bin‘ali said this entailed a sequence of excommunication to which there was no end. As Bunzel puts it, if A is an unbeliever and B excuses A’s unbelief, then B becomes an unbeliever; and if C excuses B’s unbelief, then C becomes an unbeliever, and so on ad infinitum....